You can sum up much of 20th century history by saying that in the 1930s Americans decided that markets didn't work and government did, and that in the 1970s Americans decided that government didn't work and markets did.

GOP presidential candidate John McCain announced he will be attending the first presidential debate this evening in Oxford, Mississippi after indicating he may postpone it in order to stay in Washington to work on the $700 billion financial bailout.

As we sat around picnic tables waiting for the girls’ volleyball team to come for lunch after their tournament game that Saturday morning, the mothers talked about the bad influences their daughters faced in today’s culture.

As we all know, spending in Washington is completely out of control and in desperate need of reform. We are facing an ever increasing budget, continually growing entitlement programs and a federal deficit that economists predict will hit $500 billion by 2010.

Why does Barack Obama play hide the ball with his personal resume, concealing his extreme leftist ideology and denying his damning associations? Question kind of answers itself, wouldn't you say? Be concerned, very concerned.

We own four acres of property on which our house is situated. Several of the acres have been kept in their natural state and, as a consequence, some kids have taken to riding their all-terrain vehicles on the property.

Doesn’t it strike you as hypocritical for the Democrats to get up in arms over a married mother of five running for the vice presidency? Doesn’t it seem at least slightly absurd that the only sexual activity that liberals frown upon is the sort that actually leads to babies being born?

An indictment of greed! A case for more government intervention! Worst financial crisis since the Great Depression! Failure of capitalism! This list includes the "lessons" of the recent turmoil in the financial markets.

It isn't often that public outrage peaks so close to an election, but this
is a rare moment in history when "we the people" can exact a price from the
political leadership that has duped, scammed and lied to them, contributing
mightily to the current financial mess.

Wed, Sep 24, 2008

Even if McCain had been implicated in the Keating Five scandal
-- and he wasn't -- that would still have absolutely nothing to
do with the subprime mortgage crisis currently roiling the
financial markets.

Congress is running around in circles trying to figure out how to handle the hot potato the Bush Administration has handed them with its $700 billion bailout proposal, and how they can load it up with their own list of taxpayer-financed handouts.

As Bill Maher watched Roseanne Barr deliver her inane rant on the Sept. 12 "Real Time With Bill Maher," it looked -- for half a millisecond -- that he, too, realized what a fool she was making of herself.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Edward G. Rendell and the
Republican-controlled Legislature achieved a breakthrough by agreeing to
permanent funding of the two largest transit systems in the State, PAT
in Pittsburgh and SEPTA in Philadelphia.

If a candidate for high office does a spectacularly poor job in managing his own family's finances, why on earth should we trust him in a national leadership position at a time of acute economic crisis?

Estimates of how much money a government program will cost are notoriously unreliable. Estimates of the cost of the current bailout in the financial markets run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and some say it may reach or exceed a trillion.

There is a H.L. Mencken quotation that captures the essence of this year's politics: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

The primaries are over. Barack Obama's European tour is over.
The conventions are over. The VP selections have been made, and incredibly, this race is right back where it has been since the spring: a narrow Obama lead.

Everything that has been done for the last six months has been done to cope with what previous actions were supposed to prevent. A perhaps pertinent axiom: There is no education in the second kick of a mule.

Nobody has ever lost money by betting on the federal government to overreact to a crisis. And as Congress weighs a bailout of the financial markets, it looks as if that’s where the smart money should go yet again.

Now the former volunteer adviser to Mrs. Clinton's campaign has asked the group of Democrats: Would you change your mind if Mrs. Clinton were to replace Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the vice-presidential candidate running with Sen. Barack Obama?

Mon, Sep 22, 2008

Who's responsible for the panic of 2008? In the gathering legend, it's one man, former Sen. Phil Gramm, the ex-John McCain adviser who lamented "a nation of whiners" a few months ago and therefore is fit to have responsibility for one of the nation's worst financial crises heaped on his head.

Erin Burnett of CNBC is not just another frequently appearing pretty TV face in the world of big-time business reporting. The anchor of CNBC's "Street Signs" (2-3 p.m.) and co-anchor of "Squawk on the Street" (9-11 a.m.), Burnett is a former investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs and a former vice president at Citigroup.

Judging from what I can tell of the current financial and economic woes
of the nation, I am beginning to believe that this Presidential election
may be a "no-win" proposition - the loser might very well be the lucky
one, indeed.

Sun, Sep 21, 2008

CNN’s Jack Cafferty surely spoke for legions of Obama supporters – and doubtless, a good deal of the press – when he proclaimed that it “doesn’t make sense” that the presidential polls remain neck-and-neck “unless it’s race.”

The implicit federal guarantees -- which enabled Fannie Mae and another "government-sponsored entity," Freddie Mac, to swell up with more than 11,000 employees and $5 trillion in mortgages -- have become explicit.